[NEohioPAL] REVIEW: New Works Festival at North Canton Playhouse

[Tom Wachunas]

The Secret Life of Fish… and other Writeous Brevities
By Tom Wachunas
    One way to
appreciate the sixth annual New Works Festival (aka From Script To You) at the North Canton Playhouse is to see it as a
kind of ideological prism. This is to say that if the art of the playwright is
to somehow shed light on the conditions and directions of our lives, then this
festival slices that light into a variably-hued emotional and intellectual
spectrum that filters our outlook from one play to the next. And as this
collection of seven short (mostly one-act) plays by writers from across the
U.S. so clearly (and sometimes disturbingly) reminds us, life can alternately suck
or scintillate.
    Festival Associate
Artistic Director Cassey Martin directs three of the “lighter” plays, which is
certainly not to say they lack narrative teeth: Missed Connections, written by Marj O’Neill-Butler;Many Worlds, written by Thomas J.
Misuraca; andHollywood Confidential, written
by Shirley King.
    Missed
Connections is a hilarious take on mistaken identities – a craigslist
rendezvous gone wrong. Both Krystian Bender as the fast-talking, flustered Rosie,
and Jonathan Martens as the bemused and cautious Bob, are delightfully magnetic
in their comedic skills as their characters negotiate broken expectations into
a budding relationship. It’s a broken marital relationship that drives Many Worlds, a “serio-comedy” with a
what-if, sci-fi twist. Joyce and Herman,
portrayed with startling and very funny authenticity by Tawny and Michael
Burkhardt respectively, are a hopelessly jaded, mutually accusatory and
constantly bickering husband and wife. They lapse into giddy fantasy marriages
to other spouses (played by Cassey Martin and Luke Cassidy) in alternative universes.
And speaking of giddy, Hollywood
Confidential is an over-the-top spoof – a cartoon, really -  on secret agents and super heroes that ends
the evening on a decidedly silly but refreshing note. Scott Warner as agent
Gloria brings gleeful melodrama to his/her fight against forces that would
destroy Hollywood culture, and enlists the services of Duck Man (who sounds
amazingly like Daffy Duck and vows to thwart “a death worse than fate”), played
with infectious abandon by Luke Cassidy.
    It’s a classic
application of the leave-‘em-laughin’-when-they-go maxim, and a jarring but
welcome respite from the brooding darkness of the play immediately preceding it: Solomon the King, written by Kevin
Kautzman. Jeremy Lewis, the producing artistic director of the festival,
directed this sobering story of two brothers “…whose intractable ideologies
collide with deadly consequences,” as stated in the program note. In those
roles, Zach Griffin and Dean Coutris are scarily convincing and otherwise
unsparing in the vicious tension they bring to their characters.
     Lewis also directs Dark Lengths, written by Stanley Toledo, as well as The Last Egg, by Ron Burch. In the
former, Stacy Essex is deliciously fetching and naughty in her portrayal of
Tammie, who has concocted an elaborate hoax to fend off her boss (played by
John Green). He arrives at Tammie’s home thoroughly pumped for a first date,
but soon leaves sufficiently disillusioned. The
Last Egg is a clever comedic gem that could be a sequel to the notorious
sperm scene in Woody Allen’s 1972 film, Everything
You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask). David Burkhardt
is outrageously funny as the nervous but plucky lone sperm seeking permission
to “unionize” with a very picky egg, played by the endearing Jenilee Grabenhorst,
as she carefully considers what constitutes desirable biochemistry and “that
special sperm.”
    Placed midway
through the seven plays is arguably the evening’s most compelling entry: How Storey Became A Fish. All the more
astonishing is the fact that directors Lewis and Martin wrote this riveting
work together, in May and June of this year, and cast themselves as a young girl
named Storey and her imaginary friend, Sam. Not so much a conventionally
structured story per se, this is a mesmerizing, allegorical free-form poem
about innocent games morphed into searing memories. Cassey Martin gives us a heartrending
portrait of struggling to swim upstream, as it were, through insurmountable
hurt. Jeremy Lewis in turn delivers a powerful, often crazed melding of the
remembered, simple exuberance of youth with the sinister, stifling shadows of childhood
abuse and abandonment.
   Dark? Surely. No
rose-colored glasses on this one. But then, life can be that way sometimes.
    The 2012 New Works
Festival, From Script To You, currently
showing at North Canton Playhouse McManaway Studio Theatre, 525 7th Street NE in North Canton, Ohio. Language Advisory. General Admission $10.
2-for-1 Student Tickets with I.D. Shows on FRIDAY JULY 6 and SATURDAY JULY 7.
Call (330) 494 – 1613.  www.northcantonplayhouse.com     
 
    For other reviews
and commentaries by Tom Wachunas on the visual and performing arts, please
visit his blog, ARTWACH, at  www.artwach.blogspot.com    
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